3 Lessons On How To Become A Viral Brand In 4 Short Years
Billie Eilish is an 18-year old pop star who’s grown a 52.9 million fan base within 4 short years.
I think Billie’s the perfect case study of what to do when creating a new brand, especially if you’re launching your small business in current times.
Between 2017 and 2018, Billie Eilish’s Instagram audience grew from 257K to 6.3 million. At the time of this piece, she’s now at 52.9 million followers.
In my opinion, her insane audience growth is a result of branding that you’re either mesmerized by or absolutely loathe. She’s polarizing, and it works.
Below are three ways that Billie demonstrates great brand direction and how you can apply it to your budding brand. …
Does your business take a hit whenever there’s an algorithm change on your marketing platforms? Here’s how to get around this.
First off, let me be clear that there’s really no way to beat a platform’s algorithm. This won’t be a how-to on how you can finagle Instagram’s algorithm or “secrets” to show up first in a feed.
You can try to stay on top of algorithm changes and adjust your behavior accordingly, but that in my opinion, is an uphill battle and not the best use of your business’ time or energy.
Many of you have businesses that heavily depend its success on social or sales platforms, and algorithm changes on these platforms are devastating from a numbers perspective. …
Step 1: Look at what your competitors are doing and do the complete opposite.
Creating content for your brand blows if you don’t have a recipe to bake good content every week.
It is actually the most burdensome task to pull content out of your brain when you don’t have excited inspiration behind it — the struggle of getting something out in writing, and then feeling like you didn’t put your best face out there is a double whammy of regret that’s not pleasant to sit with.
On top of this, creating content is competitive now — you need to craft content that grabs people’s attention in a way that feels authentic. You basically have to be the most interesting person in the room to your audience. …
You can’t just be pretty anymore to rise above your competitors. You need brains too.
We’re in a golden age of content where you can’t get away with just being pretty to hold a customer’s attention.
Instagram helped steward the age of pretty — functioning as the prime home where pretty content could live. It has, however, now evolved into a platform where you have to be pretty and have brains to stand out.
You have to be witty, funny, influential, inspiring, or entertaining or you’ll exit out of someone’s attention while they’re on their daily scroll. …
Come for the cocktail talk, leave with solid troubleshooting for your marketing.
If you’ve been a business owner for a couple of years now, you may have gone through the frustrating experience of your bread-and-butter marketing channel disintegrating in performance.
You may have consistently relied on referrals to fuel your income, or Instagram was absolutely killing it for you in making monthly product sales.
Then something happened.
You hit referral fatigue within your professional network, or Instagram changed its algorithm and you’re seeing a noticeable drop in your sales. …
Don’t mistake yeses for purchases, and other ways to avoid a product or service tank
Here’s the truth: predicting the success of a product or service launch based on opinion (no matter how informed) is a fortune-telling exercise, not a reliable green light.
I’ve seen a lot of successful and unsuccessful launches throughout my career, so I get asked about my opinion on whether a new product or service will tank or not.
When someone asks me this question, I always say: it sounds good but, you’re not going to know until you sell it.
Good and bad launch knowledge isn’t helpful in determining success because:
- Consumer preferences are now shifting rapidly (think of pre-covid and during-covid shifts as a great example) so what didn’t work a few years / months ago may thrive now with better execution or marketing. …
The ultimate guide to pricing like a boss — don’t do sales, don’t lower your prices, and don’t charge what you’re worth.
Pricing — it’s either a friend or a foe to you.
When it’s a foe, it’s a stressor, an annoying bug you can’t seem to get out of your head. You waver back and forth on being priced too low but are fearful of raising that price because you don’t want to lose any customers.
When you nail it, you hit it at that sweet spot where your prices are high enough to make you happy and your customers are willing to pay that price. It feels great when you hit this pricing nirvana.
The journey to pricing nirvana is riddled with challenges, confusing contradictions, and analytical spirals that’ll make your head spin. There are plenty of opportunities where you’ll be tempted to fall off course. …
Unsavory truths about successful entrepreneurs and how they got there.
There’s a lot of chest-puffing that happens in entrepreneurship.
For most, the chest-puffing still happens when things are truly going like sh*t for the entrepreneur.
It even happens when there’s complete chaos happening behind the scenes in the business.
To everyone watching, it seems like things are flowing superbly from the outside. It gives the impression to other entrepreneurs that it’s easy running a business, or that things will get easier for the business once my business looks like that person’s.
There are many wonderful aspects and benefits to entrepreneurship, but there are equally pretty unsavory truths about becoming a successful entrepreneur that not many people talk about. …
Read this before your business launches its Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale this year.
Whenever Black Friday and Cyber Monday roll around this time of the year, I prepare myself for all the marketing and sales crimes that are about to be committed.
This is the time of year when you hear from brands you had no idea you were still subscribed to. When your inbox receives an onslaught of “Our Cyber Monday sale!” emails, sales announcements, and other unnecessary garbage.
It’s the time of year when businesses lose a good chunk of audience if they don’t play their cards right.
Riding on the hype train of Black Friday, Cyber Monday (I’m going to shorten this to BFCM for ease in the rest of this post) is a potentially disastrous decision if you follow every competitor’s lead without sensitivity to what your audience expects and wants to hear from you. …
What if you could save years by knowing how it would end?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could sniff out how a long-term commitment would end before actually spending years pursuing the desired outcome?
If you knew that the guy you dated for a year would end up being a terrible partner, wouldn’t it have been nice to avoid the relationship? If you knew that going to graduate school would be useless because you’d switch careers after graduating, wouldn’t you have wanted to avoid the student debt? If you knew that you’d blow $20,000 building a new business, only to lose it all, wouldn’t you have liked a heads up?
Yes to all of the above, right? …
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